Gas Cities LLC, a joint venture between the United Arab Emirates's Crescent Petroleum and its subsidiary Dana Gas, has been officially awarded a 461-million square foot site by the Kurdistan Regional Government, or KRG, to develop the Kurdistan Gas City, a project that is expected to attract over $40 billion in foreign direct investment.
In an emailed statement, Crescent said the Kurdistan Gas City, which will include industrial, residential and commercial components in an integrated city, has a targeted initial basic infrastructure investment of $3 billion, "which will in turn facilitate further foreign direct investment exceeding $40 billion during the operations phase."
The Kurdistan Gas City is a major new sustainable and synergistic gas-utilization industrial complex, designed to promote private sector investment in a variety of gas-related industries in Iraq's Kurdistan.
"The Gas City is being structured to hold over 20 varieties of world scale petrochemical and heavy manufacturing plants, and hundreds of small and medium-sized Enterprises," the statement said.
It will also be the first in a series of similar projects around the region.
"The Kurdistan Gas City will be the first in a series of similar gas cities planned for the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia," Badr Jafar, chairman of Gas Cities LLC, and executive director at the Sharjah-based Crescent Petroleum, said in the statement.
The groundbreaking ceremony of the project will take place on Sept. 21 in the presence of Nechirvan Barzani, Prime Minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government of Iraq.
The statement said the Kurdistan Gas City is projected to generate direct and indirect job opportunities for nearly 200,000 Iraqi citizens in infrastructure, industrial projects, support services and other business activities.